the world has turned and left me here

party + an inquiry into human rights

A long night of partying this way & that. It begins with Mark & I eating sushi at Wasabi, a pleasure which has been denied me for the past month roughly, and I sit down at the sushi bar next a hippie chick with beautiful eyes. There is some amount of vibe on both ends & for this reason it is very uncomfortable, neither of us know what to say really, and so in nervousness end up misrepresenting ourselves. She leaves eventually & we do not give chase. But the sushi is good.

We go to play pool at the Spigot. After the first game a group of macho guys challenge & beat us. We retire to the back, and the evening is at this point looking pretty lame.

Then Ben calls up & says come on over, we're having a seventies party over here with an emphasis on drag. I stop by my place, and Jamaimer makes me try on a dress, but it is like 10 degrees outside and I don't look outrageous enough, so I fall back on that old pair of stupid white corduroys from Germany and a blue polyester shirt.

Half the guys at the party are indeed dressed in drag. One shows the world to us while we're playing twister, and it is indeed disgusting. As all parties at Ben's this one fails to disappoint.

Jake arrives on the scene. The party is dying down, so we go with some people to Perkins, where every last person is our age, and drunk. Jake tries to hit on this rugby chick but she keeps going off on long tangents about geology, her major. Bad form, Peter, bad form.

On the way home Jake & I get into a conversation about abortion. This has happened before. I introduce the idea that the right to life is not a real right, though it is in most practical cases derived from the other two, liberty & the pursuit of happiness. Because I believe that if you are killed swiftly & painlessly (as you could be at any time of natural causes, let's admit) and have no foreknowledge of the event, neither your liberty nor pursuit of happiness has been impinged upon. These only apply when you're living and as soon as you're not, it doesn't matter. You don't feel outrage that your rights have been violated because you don't exist. Or even if you believe you continue to exist on some other plane I don't think you'd feel outrage anymore; it just wouldn't matter.

However, that said, killing is considered wrong because (a) the victim sees it coming, or suffers horribly, violating his liberty or pursuit of happiness and (b) all the people who knew & loved that person are affected, and suffer, violating their rights. What I'm getting at here is that what's really wrong is causing others to suffer against their will. That I believe is the axiom behind the axiom that killing is wrong. Rather than accept the latter as an axiom, I have tried to question why, and believe I have found a still more basic reason. One that makes sense to me at least.

Anyway this was just the starting point for my argument, which I finally finished explaining as the sun was coming up three hours later. It led to some shocking conclusions that, I am sure, would produce knee-jerk reactions in just about anyone, as they run counter to mantras chanted at us since birth. It produced knee-jerk reactions in me as I reasoned to them.

Jake for his part made me think about a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise, and now I understand his own position much better. At some point in a real disagreement between two rational people you get down to axioms which differ on either side, and then you can't go any farther. Then you just have to say, well, I am a different being from you & so of course my axioms are different. Not willing to leave it at that has led to more wrongly inflicted suffering over the course of human history than anything else, I believe.

And Jake & I did leave it at that, and continue to respect each other. It was one of the best conversations I've had in years.